Making CA More Wily

CA's bid to acquire
Wily Technology will help the company become a lot more formidable in the multi-billion-dollar management software space, analysts said.

Wily specializes in application management software that allow IT managers
to detect and diagnose application slowdowns and failures as they occur and
before they negatively impact system performance.

Wily's software manages billions of Web transactions daily for customers who
depend on Wily without even knowing it.

For example, Wily's software manages the online reservation applications for
Starwood Hotels; every FedEx.com order placed online; and all of the online
booking and customer service transaction at British Airways

There are no shortage of these types of vendors in the market, including
IBM, HP, Symantec, Mercury Interactive and BMC.

But CA and Wily officials claimed on a conference call Thursday that no one
picks over applications with such a fine-toothed comb as Wily, performing
very fine-grained analyses without impeding application performance.

"We enable customers to take data and turn it into actionable information,"
said Wily Founder and CTO Lewis Cirne, who will join CA and help with the
integration efforts. "We deliver value in ending the finger pointing of
who is causing the problem."

On the call, CA CEO John Swainson said Wily's revenues grew by 48 percent in
2004, with 2005 revenues expected to increase 75 percent to the tune of $53
million, or more than three times as fast as the growth of the market
segment.

Swainson also said Wily has added an average of 35 new Fortune 2000
customers per quarter for the last six quarters. He attributed the surge in
application-management demand to the fact that most large
operations are moving their business processes to Web applications.

Gartner analyst Cameron Haight expects the market to top $1 billion in 2007,
with promising growth on the horizon as more and more companies look to ease
the way their transactions are piped over the Web.

Haight said CA made a strong statement in the New Year by going after Wily,
giving the company credibility in a market where they had very little.

"Their application management focus has been an area of wanting," Haight
said. "This gives them a very strong contender in the J2EE segment and some
extensions because Wily had branched out beyond just J2EE, doing MQSeries
and other parts of the middleware spectrum.

Haight said CA still has some holes to fill, though. For example, it doesn't have a
particularly strong offering for [Microsoft] Exchange, SAP and Oracle
applications. But he said CA bought into one of the faster growing parts of
the application management business.

Haight said CA will have a vendor in Wily that consistently ranks as a
leader in its Magic Quadrant profile for J2EE application server management.
Wily has done so well in part because it was a first-mover in the commercial
market for granular inspection of application server health, he said.

"The big issue is the Wily customers," Haight said. "In the past, this may
have been viewed with some degree of apprehension. But over the past 12-18
months, with the acquisitions of Niku, Concord and Netegrity, CA has shown
the ability to retain many of the key players and grow those businesses."